OK, I should have pulled my finger out and posted this on Friday while it was still kinda relevant. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an outrageous story debunked so quickly. Mind you, you won’t have to go far to find some right wing nutjob or overly-impressionable simpleton who will still wear blind it’s true.

I’m talking of course about the mildly wacky McCain supporter who invented an absurd story about being attacked by some black dude who supposedly carved a “B” into her face because he was a “B”arack Obama supporter and she was a John McCain supporter. Not that it’s inconceivable in general terms for an attack of that type to occur. White Republicans hardly have a monopoly on being cowardly bullies. It was the specifics that were so absurd.

The story was, in fact, so absurd that for a while I could have been easily convinced that it was a prank and/or satire staged by an Obama supporter. But it appears she really was a McCain campaign worker. By the way, I don’t think the McCain campaign had anything to do with this. Their stoking of racist fears is hardly subtle but even they are slightly less insane than this. My personal favourite touch was that the “B” was reversed… kind of what you might do if you were really stupid and looking in a mirror while carving a “B” into your own face.

I believe in mental health circles this is known as “a cry for help”.

I found this story on Friday night and couldn’t believe the absurdity of it. There was too much material there for me to *not* run with it so I decided to go for a totally overblown satire. Knowing full well some morons would take it at face value. Even though I led the description of the video with “Stupid people don’t get satire.”

And I was also amused by the number of people who rushed to comment in the ensuing hours that the story was untrue. Really? Lucky I had those internet commenters to save me from thinking for myself.

Last year when an American friend was visiting, he was appalled at how expensive and limited internet access in Australia is. That’s OK, I’m appalled too. Because of my YouTube obsession I’ve gone for basically the fastest service available. It’s cable access but the broadband speeds are capped at 25GB. When you’re on YouTube and other video sites as much as I am (all right, fine – when you download as much porn as I do) it’s dead easy to go over that limit. So much so that I’m constantly monitoring usage so that my connection doesn’t get strangled down to dialup speeds.

Oh, and it costs $99 per month.

In other words it sucks. But the new(ish) federal government had promised to go ahead with some much overdue investment in infrastructure so the future was looking brighter. So I was delighted to learn of the government’s first major internet initiative. No, wait a minute. Not delighted. What’s that other thing I always feel? Oh yeah. Really fucking angry.

Outraged in fact. It seem the government has decided that nobody in Australia is enough of a grownup to deal with all the naughtiness on the internet and so plans to force a mandatory filtering/censorship program on the entire internet.

This is bad on so many level it simply boggles the mind. It’s a disturbing level of censorship. It won’t work. It will cripple internet speeds that are already shit. And it will be absurdly expensive. And they can talk all the shit they want about “protecting children” and “illegal” content. Any filter they put in place will be trivially easy to get around. But at least they’ll have fucked up the internet for law-abiding citizens. Not one iota of difference to criminals but we can’t have everything, can we?

This has been my venting topic of the week on YouTube. Here’s the ranty version of my thoughts:

And here’s my more rational take on the topic:

I’ve been recommending concerned Australians support the EFA and make some noise themselves. It might be an horrific Big Brother/nanny state/police state nightmare we facing but at least we can have a laugh about it as well.

I am totally over the idiocy, paranoia and hatred being spewed by the anti-Obama camp. And not that I feel like giving any ground to the fucwits who have been drooling this shit but I will clarify the “racist” remark. Of course not everyone who isn’t voting for Obama is a racist. But everyone pushing the “terrorist” innuendo and outright smears is either an ignorant, racist fuck or is an evil, soulless, lying sack of shit who is pandering to ignorant, racist fucks.

And speaking of pandering, I don’t think people are cutting John McCain enough slack for the way he’s tried to calm down the rhetoric at his rallies recently. I saw the video and he seemed to be suffering actual physical pain at the way he had to repeatedly tell people Obama was trustworthy and decent and not some baby eating demon or, worse, an arab. He knows he fucked up and he’s decided to take some responsibility for it. Maybe a little late but not near as late as he could have left it.

The big question for me is why did he do it? He’s clearly done a 180 degree flip from what he was doing only a week earlier. My theory is that he’s looked at the numbers and realised he’s going to lose the election. He followed the advice of the evil, ruthless bastards in the GOP machine and gave up all of his standards and sank into the gutter. He followed the advice of the same people who fucked him over with their lies in the 2000 primary race. And it didn’t work.

I think he’s changed course just so he can live with himself. He spent months abandoning any principles he had in his lust to win. He gave up his soul and got nothing in return. And who knows, this last ditch decency strategy might win him back a few moderates. But given that is really is nothing but the barest standards of decency after months of lies, smears and hate mongering it’s almost certainly too little, too late.

At least it shows he hasn’t totally passed over into the dark side. He has at least vestigal remnants of human decency. He never deserved to be fucked over by his own party – his time was in 2000. It’s too late now. He’s too old, too unwell, his judgement is clearly shot and the choice of Sarah Palin as VP is a disgusting insult to the American people. Given the chances of him dying in office are about 110% (with a 10% margin of error in that figure) Palin has to be seen as a Presidential nomination. And neither America nor the world would survive that.

What was I thinking? I decided to tell a story of the worst injury I ever received – way back in the dark ages when I was in school:

Telling a story like that is nothing unusual but I asked people to tell their injury story in return. So now I’ve spent a few hours being grossed out by people’s comments. If you have a strong stomach, check them out yourself:

Well, it looks another presidential debate passed by without changing much. From what I’ve read, these debates rarely have an influence on election outcomes but these ones seem even less likely to as nothing decisive seems to be happening in them.

Interestingly, I’ve seen a few commentators being fascinated by CNN’s use of real time reaction measurement by giving “undecided” voters a box with a dial to twiddle and translating the results into a moving line. It’s isn’t that I want to deride CNN’s cutting edge widgets but we’ve had that crap for ages in Australia – over a decade, I think. We call it the worm.

The most interesting thing I read about the debate was that McCain apparently deigned to look at Obama this time. I personally think Obama should have punked him as they went to shake hands. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would have laugh if, at the critical point, instead of shaking hands Obama suddenly lunged at McCain as if he was going to hit him just to see McCain flinch.

White guys ALWAYS jump when black guys do that – even if the black guy is a lifelong friend. I’m not saying I find it inherently funny when obnoxious old men shriek like a little girl, fall over and shit their pants. OK, I am saying that’s funny. Comedy gold.